How to Snag a Discount by Buying Two Tickets at Once

Chicken bus in Panama City: "Diablo Rojo" or the red devil

Looking for a crazy bus ride?

It’s a common problem when traveling as a couple: you’re looking for a plane, train, or bus ticket and you think you’ve found the perfect one. Then you go to buy it and find the price shoots up. What the?!

What happened is there’s only one cheap ticket left, and when you try to buy it for two people you’re getting one cheap ticket and one expensive.

It happened to us today when we tried to book a ticket from Toronto to New York City on Megabus. Megabus is known for having some super-cheap fares, if you can find them. And in this case, I’d found a great one: $12 per person for the 11 hour overnight bus trip.

Trouble was, when I entered two passengers, I got a price of $35 for both of us. We were getting the last $12 ticket, and then a more expensive $23 ticket.

Happily, there’s a way around this problem: two computers, simultaneously purchasing the low-priced ticket.

Two laptops at a time

Two laptops in the same time

I got both our laptops ready, and did the ticket search again, for 1 passenger only. Both showed the $12 fare available. Then I added both tickets to the shopping carts, and went through the payment process on both computers, making sure to hit the ‘next’ button from each screen at the same time.

We made it all the way to the end, put in our payment details, and success! Two tickets purchased for a total of $24.

We’ve used this trick before, and it works with all kinds of tickets: air, train, bus, anything where there’s different classes of tickets with limited numbers available.

Here’s our method to make sure we’re getting the best price buying tickets for two:

  • Always search for the best fare for only 1 passenger
  • Once you’ve found the best fare, add a second passenger.
  • If the fare per person stays the same, great!
  • If not, use a second computer and purchase the same ticket twice, making sure to go through each step of the process at exactly the same time on both computers

Has this tip been helpful to you? Any ideas to share? Post a comment!

New York, here we come!

New York, here we come!

Tips by Ryan 🙂

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14 Responses to “How to Snag a Discount by Buying Two Tickets at Once”

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